Nancy Roberts was talking about retargeting when she offered a better lesson about attention. It was 2020. The mobile advertising business, an industry accustomed to handshakes in Berlin, Australia and San Francisco, had been flattened into a grid of faces. Every seller seemed to have reached for the same answer: another email, another webinar, another gift card dangled in exchange for half an hour. Roberts, then the chief marketing officer of YouAppi, had reached her limit. She estimated that 30 to 50 sales emails went unread in her inbox each day.
Her alternative sounded almost suspiciously simple. Consider the individual. Make something timely. Write the way a person speaks. Her team staged at-home workouts with Adjust and Barry's Bootcamp, drawing more than 60 mobile marketers to each session. It invited a chef to teach recipes instead of asking an executive to narrate a slide deck. The audience was stuck at home, tired of being treated like a pipeline. Roberts changed the gathering to fit the people.
“Talk to me like I'm a human.”Nancy Roberts, on outreach that earns attention
This is the useful contradiction at the center of Roberts' career. She markets systems filled with prediction models, bidding decisions, attribution rules and acronyms whose natural habitat is a conference lanyard. Yet her instinct is to remove the corporate varnish. If a message would sound strange coming from a friend, the message has a problem. Throwing money at that problem, she observed, does not improve it. She once refused a $100 DoorDash offer for taking a sales call. The gift promised lunch; it also asked for her time, phone number and inbox. Lunch lost.
A technologist at heart, a translator by trade
Long before RZR put Roberts in charge of marketing, her work sat between the business and the machine. In 2015, Glispa announced her as its U.S. general manager. She arrived from a vice presidency in business development at FriendFinder with an 18-year record in digital work, an award-winning affiliate program and the 2015 XBIZ Executive Award for Businesswoman of the Year. The appointment described her as a business problem solver, marketing strategist and “technologist at heart.” Her sweet spot was where engineering met commerce.
The assignment required more than translating features. Roberts established Glispa's presence in North America, built its team and led marketing, sales, product and partnerships in the region. Former colleagues remembered her talent for spotting people and helping them grow. They also credited her with creating a culture that could contribute to the global company, rather than acting like a distant sales outpost. At GamesBeat in 2015, she joined a discussion about using data to acquire players, improve in-app purchases and increase advertising revenue. The language was performance marketing. The operating job was coalition-building.
Four rooms, one recurring assignment
Glispa asks Roberts to build its U.S. operation and connect a global ad-tech company to the American market.
YouAppi asks its global CMO to keep marketers engaged when the industry's in-person circuit disappears.
CRAFTSMAN+ presents Roberts as president while creative production, automation and performance move closer together.
RZR asks its CMO to explain a single system spanning user acquisition, retargeting and connected television.
In late 2019, Roberts moved to YouAppi to lead global marketing. The remit expanded: build the company story around mobile acquisition, remarketing and retention, then carry that story across regions. By 2022 she also held the title of managing director for North America. When YouAppi placed highly in AppsFlyer's performance rankings, Roberts spoke about loyalty after the install. Acquisition gets the confetti. Retention pays the rent.
She kept appearing where the market was trying to understand itself: an App Growth Summit panel on new video formats, another on churn and onboarding, a session about sustainable leadership, and later discussions about artificial intelligence in mobile marketing. Her 2023 forecast argued that connected TV was nearing a practical tipping point as streaming businesses opened more inventory and advertisers demanded clearer outcomes. Three years later, that forecast had become part of her employer's main product pitch.
The president learns to ask what scaled
At CRAFTSMAN+, Roberts served as president while the creative advertising company pushed into automation, connected TV and digital out-of-home work. The company ranked No. 1520 on the 2024 Inc. 5000, then returned in 2025 at No. 2476 after reporting 171 percent revenue growth over three years. Deloitte placed it No. 330 on its 2024 Technology Fast 500. Those are company results, not trophies one executive gets to pocket. They do, however, show the scale of the organization she was helping to run.
Roberts' panel topics during this period reveal what the title alone cannot. She discussed artificial intelligence beyond ChatGPT, creative technology, influencer shifts and the pressure of imposter syndrome. She founded an event series called Women in Leader(sip), a pun that treats the drink as an invitation to a harder conversation. Behind the playful name was an old concern: who gets into the room, who speaks once inside it, and who feels obliged to prove they belong there.
Five quiet months, then a permanent rule
Roberts has explained where that concern became personal. Earlier in her career, she concealed a pregnancy for five months while being considered for a promotion she had already earned on the metrics. The experience changed her approach to authority. She decided that people on her teams should never feel compelled to hide part of themselves to be judged worthy of an opportunity. The resulting leadership philosophy is plain: clarity, support and honesty about what the work actually requires.
“I try to be the kind of leader I wish I'd had earlier.”Nancy Roberts, on making room for others
Parenthood sharpened the same muscles from another direction. Roberts has two boys. She credits them with teaching radical clarity, quick pivots and patience after the day's official supply has been exhausted. A child rejecting dinner because a sandwich was cut into rectangles instead of triangles can be humbling. It also imposes perspective. Small workplace dramas lose some of their grandeur when you have already litigated the geometry of lunch.
Her lighter preferences form a compact field guide to the same personality. Morning over evening. Taco over burrito. Spice over sugar. Text over a call, emphatically. On that 2020 podcast, Roberts said she had just cleared 221 missed calls. She stores coffee mugs upside down because dust and bugs have no business settling inside. She uses the same mug every morning, printed with a phrase too blunt for a motivational poster. The details are comic, but the operating logic is consistent: clear the clutter, say the thing, get on with the day.
If a marketing sentence would sound absurd over coffee, Roberts' public advice suggests that it probably belongs back in the draft.
A new name for a larger machine
In March 2026, Roberts was publicly identified as Aarki's chief marketing officer. Days later, Aarki became RZR. The change gave her a particularly demanding translation problem. The company wanted to present user acquisition, retargeting, connected TV and influencer campaigns as one connected performance system. Its infrastructure processes more than six million queries per second across four company-operated data centers. Buyers still need to understand the proposition before the next slide.
The rebrand compresses the arc of Roberts' career. Mobile gaming supplied the early performance discipline. Retargeting shifted attention from the install to the customer's later value. Creative technology multiplied the ads and formats. Connected television took measurable performance onto the largest screen in the house. RZR's pitch gathers those pieces under one intelligence layer. Roberts' job is to make the gathering feel inevitable rather than merely crowded.
Her recent recruiting language offers a clue to how she approaches it. A product marketer, she wrote, should be able to enter a roadmap conversation and leave with a buyer-ready story. The line could describe Roberts' own route. She has spent years moving between engineers, salespeople, marketers and customers, carrying meaning from one room into another. A useful operator does more than repeat what each group says. She makes the translation survive contact with the next group.
Ad tech will keep inventing nouns. Screens will keep joining the plan. Models will make more decisions in less time. Roberts' advantage remains slower and harder to automate: noticing when the person on the receiving end has stopped listening. The fix might be a cleaner sentence, a more honest manager, a cooking class, or a sandwich cut the right way. Precision begins there, well before the bid.